The Mysteries: Prologue, Pt 2

10Jan

Nothing ever truly dies.

That is what repeated in my ears for the week following my initial dive into this years Mysteries preparations. I had just finished reading the chat log from KO’s discussion about Osiris and it would not leave my brain- nothing ever truly dies.

Most astral people I’ve met know this to be a “thing”. It’s a blessing and a curse that stuff is pretty much impossible to kill in the Unseen. It’s a blessing when the person that you love comes back to life a little while later, and its a curse when the asshole down the street just won’t keel over. Even when you think something’s dead, it rarely is. It’s either just in the process of preparing to be reborn, or it’s been reborn somewhere where you can’t see it.

But nothing ever really dies.

via flickr

We even see it here on this plane. Even though your auntie might never re-inhabit her body again, she lives on in the stories we tell of her. She lives on through her children, and items that she owned that we still use. She lives on through her famous casserole recipe that we use at family functions. Even though she is a little harder to see now- she continues to live.

This is also true of ideas and concepts. They say that history repeats itself, and I think that that is another formation of “nothing ever dies” or “things that you wish would die rarely do”. We often fall back into old habits and old ways of thinking because true and total death is nearly impossible.

It is with that notion that O sent me onto the next leg of my pre-Mysteries work.

It took me a while to see where this was going, honestly. I knew the concept well, and many of the astral people I had sent to their deaths earlier in the year had undergone the necessary rebirth processes and found their way back to me in due time. I knew what it meant to watch a core explode in my hands and hoping that this person would eventually find a way to exist in a better state. So it’s not like it was completely uncharted territory for me. But in this situation, his applications for me were a bit more abstract.

His applications dealt more with the ways of thinking that I mentioned above. He was hinting at the intangible thoughts and feelings that exist inside of us and how I would handle those things. You see, feelings have a way of growing and consuming us. My anger and doubt from the previous year’s mess had proven this to be true. What started off as something small- a small seed of discouragement or a moment of doubt- eventually grew into a monster that was fed and fueled by the world around me (including myself). His reminder that nothing ever truly dies was his way of noting that just because I beat this today doesn’t mean I won’t have to beat it down again tomorrow.

Those of you out there who deal with mental “demons” such as depression and anxiety can likely relate to this.

This was also his way of telling me not to slack off on my mental and emotional hygiene. I can no longer ignore these things for weeks and months at a time. It’s not healthy.

Every emotion that we feel, every pain, every loss- it resides within us somewhere. All of the turmoil and strife from this past year will reside within me forever to some extent. Even if I am able to cope with it, accept it and grow from it, it will not change that because things don’t entirely die- some tiny bit of that emotion will live within me forever. And this sentiment exists not only for the bad emotions, but the good emotions as well. In situations where I feel extreme rage or hatred for someone, there is still the opposite love and caring that I felt for them beforehand. Just because the anger burns within me doesn’t mean that the pre-existing love isn’t there as well (even if it is hard to see). It is possible that the stronger the love was before, the stronger the hate and hurt will be after the fact.

I mulled on these concepts for a couple of days and mused on what it was I was looking for over the next month. Yes, I wished to heal my wounds, but what would healing look like? Would I seek to let go of the anger and move back towards love? Would I even be able to go back to my feelings before? Should I go back to the feelings I had before?

I wrote down a list of the people and situations I was trying to heal from over the past year and I decided where my end goal was for each. For some people, I wanted to return to a love I felt before things went south. In other situations, all I could ever hope for was a neutrality of existence. Neutral in the sense that when I see them, or their name or words, I would feel nothing, or at least nothing beyond a sense of “this is that person that I know of.” I continued to work through my emotions and keep track of when I was stable and able to let go of negativity surrounding certain people and situations, and on the days where I found that I was slipping into old thought patterns, I sat down and examined why I was falling back into old mentalities.

Even after the Mysteries officially had begun and I had started on my crack-laden adventure at O’s behest, I’d find that I’d have to sit down and re-examine things regularly. Once again looking at where the emotions are coming from and why I am feeling them. Osiris had given me the tools to better understand my emotions, and I found myself turning back to those tools regularly as I worked through all of the relationships I had experienced during the past year.

He told me right before the Mysteries started that he would strip me down to nothing before this was all over. At the time, I didn’t truly realize what he meant, but I certainly would by the time this whole experience was done.